This was surrounded by stamps, squiggles and signatures. The first name was Captain Melsky, Head of 9th Section of 4th Department, Main Administration of State Security. But a thick felt pen had been put through his name and underneath, in what appeared to be a child’s handwriting and spelling, someone had written: I will carry out this oberation myself. B. Kobylov, Commissar-General, State Security, second degree. Then later: Oberation compleded. Prisoner Alexandra Zeitlin-Palitsyn delivered to Internal Prison. B. Kobylov, Commissar-General, State Security, second degree.
The Marmoset was still sitting there leering, but Katinka did not care. She was gripped. So Sashenka and her husband had fallen in 1939. Why? When she turned the page, she found the testimony of a man named Peter Sagan, ex-Captain of the Gendarmes, Okhrana officer and later (under a false name) a schoolteacher in Irkutsk. Sagan revealed that Sashenka and Vanya had been in Petersburg in 1917 – just like Satinov. But soon the outpouring of crazed accusations against the Palitsyns became too much to absorb. It seemed a ghost had emerged out of the mists of time bearing a plague of lies and accusations. But then she looked at the date of the Sagan confession: it was 5 July – after Sashenka’s arrest. Sagan had not arrived in Lubianka until 1 July. So Sashenka had been arrested for something else. But what?
Katinka leafed hungrily through the badly typed fifteen-page confession signed at each corner with Sagan’s frail, anaemic markings – how strange, she thought, that these characters’ lives were reduced to strokes of the pen. She tried to imagine the personality behind the fading lines of ink, and trembled.
Next she found a single piece of paper with a paragraph headed Extract from confession of Beniamin Lazarovich ‘Benya’ Golden: attach to file of Alexandra Zeitlin-Palitsyn. The writer Benya Golden. She’d heard of him and his one masterpiece, those stories of the Spanish Civil War. She read on:
B. Golden: Using the depraved seductive techniques of the Mata Hari type of spy, Sashenka – accused Alexandra Zeitlin-Palitsyn – first seduced me sexually under guise of inviting me to write for her magazine and persuaded me to meet her for corrupt sexual practices in Room 403 at the Metropole Hotel, set aside by the Writers’ Union/Litfond for the use of non-Moscow writers for Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping magazine, which she edited. While wearing the mask of a new Soviet woman, Zeitlin-Palitsyn admitted to me she was an Okhrana agent and Trotskyite and asked me to introduce her to the French secret service, who had recruited me in Paris in 1935 when I was travelling to the International Writers’ Congress with the Soviet delegation. She had already recruited her uncle Mendel Barmakid, a member of the Central Committee, and I recruited her other relative, my friend the famous writer Gideon Zeitlin, to help plan the assassination of Comrades Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich and Marshal Voroshilov at a party at Sashenka’s house by spraying the gramophone that Comrade Stalin would use with poison. The first attempt at her house – when Comrade Stalin visited on May Day 1939 – failed because I failed to spray the gramophone …
Witnessed: Investigator Rodos, Very Important Cases Department, Main Administration of State Security
Katinka recoiled. So Benya Golden, that talented, elegiac writer, had rolled over and incriminated Sashenka. It must have been Golden’s denunciation that got her arrested. How could he have done so? The accusations against Sashenka seemed preposterous.
Yet this was dated 6 August, even later than the Peter Sagan confession. Katinka hurriedly turned more pages. She had been reading for over fifteen minutes. After a rather picturesque collage of stamps, triangular, square and round, she read a note dated six months later:
Office of Military Procurator, 19 January 1940 The case against the Zeitlin–Palitsyn–Barmakid terrorist spy group is now complete and must be handed over to the court … Send the case to the Military Tribunal, 21 January 1940.
Katinka felt a nervous twinge as if she, or someone close to her, was going to be tried on 21 January 1940. Sashenka’s eyes looked out anxiously from the photograph. Maxy was right: there was an intimacy in these mysterious old papers, and an unbearable sense of tragedy. What happened to these people at the trial? Did Sashenka live or die? Katinka eagerly turned the page. There was nothing more.
‘Five minutes!’ said the Marmoset, drumming his fingers on the desk. Katinka noticed he was reading a magazine on football, Manchester United Fanzine. She noted down the basic facts in her exercise book and the new names: Benya Golden – famed writer. Mendel Barmakid – forgotten apparatchik. Gideon Zeitlin – literary figure.
Katinka quickly reached for the Palitsyn file. First the photograph: Ivan Palitsyn, Sashenka’s husband and Satinov’s friend, side and front views, a burly, athletic man, with thick greying hair, a Tatar slant to the cheekbones. A handsome specimen of that shaggy Russian proletarian type, he had been a real worker at the Putilov Works. But in the picture, he had a black eye and bleeding lip. He must have put up a fight, decided Katinka. He wore a torn NKVD tunic. She looked into his eyes and saw … weariness, disdain, anger, not the fear and the appealing sarcasm in his wife’s eyes.
‘Four minutes,’ said the Marmoset.
She read his biography. Vanya was a top Chekist who had guarded Lenin himself in the early years in Petrograd and Moscow, 1917–19. Rising over the bodies of his bosses during the Terror, he must have been responsible for his share of crimes until … She found an arrest order, shortly before that of his wife. That must be why he looked more weary and angry than afraid: yes, he understood what was to come but he was bored by the procedures that he knew so well. What happened to him? She read and reread the file, noting the dates, trying to understand the sequence. Everything was there but nothing was what it said it was: it was in Soviet gibberish, the code of Bolshevism. She leafed ahead: Palitsyn had started to confess on 7 June and continued into July, August and September. He too had been sent for trial.
‘Time’s up,’ said the Marmoset.
‘Please – one second!’ She missed out some pages and jumped to the end of the file. She had to find out what had happened to Palitsyn. She found a signed confession.
Accused Palitsyn: I plead guilty to spying for the Japanese and British intelligence services, to serving Trotsky, and planning a terrorist plot against the leadership of the Soviet Union. But there was no end to his story – and no mention of Satinov, no link to a common past.
She noted down the dates in her book and sighed, wanting to cry. Why? For these two people whom she had never known?
‘There’s no record of a sentence,’ she said aloud. ‘Could they have survived? Could they be alive?’
‘Does it say in the file that they died?’ asked the colonel.
She shook her head.
‘Well then …’ He stood up and stretched.
‘But there’s a lot missing from these files, Colonel. No details of sentencing. Perhaps the Palitsyns were sent to the Gulags and amnestied after Stalin’s death. I wish to apply for more files. I want to find out what happened to these people.’
‘Is this a game, girl? Fa-la-la! Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe not. I’ll refer your request to my superior, General Fursenko. I’m just a cog in the machine.’
Katinka felt downcast suddenly. She had still not found out why Sashenka and her husband had been arrested. Captain Sagan’s confession was dated after their arrest. She did not believe Benya Golden’s story of his affair with Sashenka, let alone the conspiracy to assassinate the Party leaders, so perhaps this too was invented? And she still didn’t know if all this was in any way connected to Satinov.
As she slid the Sashenka file across the desk to the colonel, she accidentally bent back the blank list of those who had examined the file. On the other side were some scrawled names from 1956: her heart leaped. There it was: Hercules Satinov.
The Marmoset started to check if each document was present, wetting his fingertips with his tongue as he turned the pages.
Katinka saw she had another minute or two. She quickly reopened Ivan Palitsyn’s file –
and something caught her eye.
There it was, on the State Security headed paper, a handwritten order dated 4 May 1939:
Soveshno sekretno. Top Secret
Captain Zubenko, Special Technical Group, State Security
Set up immediate surveillance in Moscow city limits
only on Comrade Sashenka Zeitlin-Palitsyn, editor,
Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping, 23
Petrovka, and set up listening equipment in Room 403,
Metropole Hotel, with immediate effect. Reports only to
me, no copies.
Katinka stared at the signature. Vanya Palitsyn, Commissar-General of State Security, third degree.
Sashenka’s husband.
Afterwards, Katinka walked through the Moscow streets, down the hill past the Bolshoi towards the Kremlin. She gripped her notebook and glanced at the stalls of the street-sellers offering pirated CDs, sensationalist history pamphlets, American pornography, Italian showbiz magazines, even Peter the Great’s Book of Manners. But she was not really looking at them. Once she bumped into a man, who shouted at her, and another time she walked right into a Lada parked on the pavement. She was trying to make sense of what she had found in the file. Finally, she walked up the cobbled hill from the river, past the Kremlin’s ramparts and then round and round Red Square.
Perhaps Benya Golden’s confession had been true after all. Could Sashenka really have had an affair with a famous writer in Room 403 at the Metropole Hotel? But it would have been such a dangerous thing to seduce the wife of a Chekist, who had all the weapons of the secret police – surveillance, bugging, arrest – at his disposal. Somehow Vanya seemed to have found out about the affair and he himself had set the ball rolling, unleashing the thunderbolt: a personal investigation without official sanction. Reports only to me, no copies. Palitsyn.
Jealousy, Katinka thought. Were they all ruined because of one man’s fear of being cuckolded? Did they all die because of his jealousy?
10
‘So Vanya Palitsyn recorded his wife in bed with a writer?’ said Maxy that evening, sitting on his motorbike in leathers, outside the nightclub near the British Embassy. ‘He gets the report: all the oohs and aahs of fucking …’
‘… Vanya was outraged,’ Katinka continued, ‘and ordered Benya Golden’s arrest.’
‘No, no,’ said Maxy. ‘Benya Golden’s a famous writer and Sashenka was well known, the niece of Mendel Barmakid, “Conscience of the Party”. And if this just concerned adultery, why was Vanya himself arrested?’
‘Benya was arrested and then denounced his mistress Sashenka who denounced her husband?’
‘No, Katinka, you’re missing the point. They couldn’t have been arrested without Stalin’s approval.’ Maxy lit a cigarette. ‘Besides, the dates don’t tally. You must realize the archives are full of lies and distortions. We have to read them like hieroglyphics.’
Katinka sighed. It was getting cold, and her miniskirt did not keep out the wind. ‘What shall I do now?’
‘Don’t get upset about all this. You’ve done really well – better than I thought possible.’ Maxy looked at his Red Army watch. ‘Wait – it’s only 9 p.m.: why don’t you ring his eminence the marshal? You need his help to get the rest of the KGB files, the stuff they didn’t show you. And now you know more, you can ask more. We need him to confirm that the Palitsyn family are the ones to follow.’
Business concluded, he offered her a cigarette and struck a match. They both sheltered the flame with cupped hands. As their skin touched, his eyes narrowed, and she was conscious of him looking at her carefully.
‘Tell me – are you spending all that oligarch’s money? On clothes? Or make-up? No, you’re too sensible, too serious. You’re not spending any of it. You should enjoy life more!’ He laughed. ‘You’re too cute, Katinka, for a historian.’ He leaned over and brushed the hair off her face.
‘Not so fast,’ she said coolly, allowing him to kiss her on the cheek. His stubble burned her skin.
Flicking his cigarette into the air so that it landed on the embankment by the Moskva, he pulled on his helmet, kick-started the bike and sped away towards the Stone Bridge.
Katinka watched him go then touched her cheek where he had kissed her and repeated his line mockingly to herself: You’re too cute for a historian. What a ridiculous gambit, she thought. You may be my teacher, but you’re a bit of a poser. I decide who kisses me and who doesn’t.
Then slowly, thoughtfully, with the eight red stars of the Kremlin sparkling above her, she walked over to the public telephone and dialled a number.
‘I’m listening,’ answered an old man with a Georgian accent.
‘I won’t be dancing this time,’ said Hercules Satinov with a wintry smile. He was sitting in his chair at Granovsky, surrounded as usual by the photographs of his family, beneath the portrait of himself as the bemedalled marshal. ‘I’m getting sicker.’
‘No smoking, Father! He was showing off to a pretty girl,’ said Mariko, bringing in the tea. ‘He had to go to bed afterwards, you know.’ She sounded angry, as if this was Katinka’s fault. ‘You shouldn’t have come now. It’s much too late. You should go.’ Mariko banged the tray on the table and left the room, tossing a sour glare at the visitor.
‘It’s all right, Mariko …’ Mariko shut the door, though a creaking suggested she was never far away. ‘Well,’ said Satinov, ‘I am rather ancient.’ When Katinka sat in the same chair as last time and crossed her legs, the old man glanced at her approvingly. ‘You look as if you’ve been out dancing in nightclubs. Well, why not? Why should a flower as young and fresh as you waste her youth on dusty archives and ancient miseries?’ He pulled out his cigarettes again, lighting up and closing his eyes.
‘It’s what I do best, Marshal.’
‘You might not have as long as you think for your researches,’ he said, ‘or are you getting fond of me?’ He looked right at her. ‘Well, girl, what did you find?’
Katinka took a deep breath. ‘In 1956 you visited the Lubianka and examined the files of Sashenka and Vanya Palitsyn. They were old friends of yours from before the Revolution. They were the link with the past you wanted me to find.’
‘You seem keener on the subject than you were before,’ he observed.
‘I am. These people – they seem so real somehow.’
‘Ah. So the historian of Catherine the Great is getting involved in our own times. You smell the happy flowers and the bitter ashes? That shows you’re a real historian.’
‘Thank you, Marshal.’
‘Tell me again,’ he said, leaning forward suddenly. ‘Your name’s Vinsky. Why did you get this job?’
‘I was recommended by Academician Beliakov. I was his top student.’
‘Of course,’ Satinov said, sucking on his cigarette, eyelids sliding down. ‘I can see you’re a clever girl, a special person. Academician Beliakov was right to choose you out of all his hundreds of students over his many decades of teaching … Think of that.’
‘I think he wanted to help me.’ Katinka felt annoyed. She could see that he was toying with her, as he had with so many other inferior beings in his lifetime. This was another Satinov, sly and reptilian. The chilliness shocked her, poisoning her liking for him.
‘Marshal, please could you answer my question. Sashenka and Vanya Palitsyn are the people I was meant to find, aren’t they? What became of them?’
Satinov shook his head, and Katinka noticed a muscle twitching in his cheek.
‘There’s no record of their trial or sentencing. Could they have survived?’
‘Unlikely but possible. Last year a woman found her husband, who had been arrested in 1938 – he was living in Norilsk.’ He gave her a brief, bitter smile. ‘You’re on a quest for the philosopher’s stone which so many have sought and none has found.’
Katinka gritted her teeth and started again. ‘I really need your help. I need to see their files – the ones the KGB are still holding.’
He inhaled, taking his time, as always. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll call some old friends in the Organs – they’re all geriatrics like me, waiting to die at their dachas, fishing, playing chess, cursing the new rich. But I’ll do my best.’
‘Thank you.’ She sat forward in her chair. ‘The files mentioned that the Palitsyns had two children, Volya and Karlmarx. What happened to them?’
‘I have no idea. Like so many children of those times, they too perhaps just disappeared.’
‘But how?’
‘That’s your job to find out,’ he said coldly, shifting in his chair. ‘Where did you say you came from? The northern Caucasus, wasn’t it?’
Katinka took a quick breath of excitement. He’d changed the subject, a petty diversion. She scented her prey. ‘May I just ask – you knew the Palitsyns. What were they like?’
He sighed. ‘They were dedicated Bolsheviks.’
‘I saw her photograph in the file. She was so beautiful and unusual …’
‘Once you saw her, you never forgot her,’ he said quietly.
‘But such sad eyes,’ said Katinka.
Satinov’s face hardened, the angles of his Persian nose and cheekbones sharpened, became more triangular. His eyes slid closed. ‘She was hardly alone. There are millions of such photographs. Millions of repressed people just like her.’
Katinka could feel Satinov closing down, so she pressed him again.
‘Marshal, I know you’re tired, and I’m going now … but was Roza Getman one of their children?’
Sashenka Page 44
